Page 26 of Girl, Entangled

‘Mia,’ Ella answered. ‘Sorry, I was asleep.’

‘No kidding. Get to Rumford Avenue. Northwest, up in Brightwood. Number eighteen. You’ll see the cars before you see the house. And get ready, because it’s grim.’

‘Give me thirty minutes.’

‘Done. And check your messages.’

Ella hung up, then quickly went through her texts. She had a bunch from Ripley, one of which was an attached MP4 file. She opened it up.

She watched it through once, and didn’t manage to take it all in at once. The mind didn’t work that way with footage like this, even with her brain. It picked, it flinched, it grabbed at the parts it could distill and left the rest. Only after three or four playthroughs did she take it all in.

And take it all in she did. It was a man in a chair who was no longer in command of his own body. It was a second figure standing over him, and the size of that figure, a man built to a measurement that men were not built to. The hood. The bare arms. The ax in his hands was raised up high, the way an executioner might pose, for the watching, for the ceremony of it.

There was no question now. Whatever she and Ripley had been circling at the Renaissance faire, whatever had hanged Billy Hayes with a hangman’s noose, it had not stopped, and it had not hidden, and last night it had let the whole world watch it work.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Of all the ways to find a man dead, headless was the one the mind struggled with the most. The face was where a person’s identity was kept, but the man in the chair offered her no such luxury. He ended in a ragged, bloody stump at the collar.

‘No. We haven’t found his head,’ said Chief Hibbert.

Ella, Ripley and Hibbert were in an upstairs office in a house belonging to a man named Curtis Brennan, thirty-five, who lived alone. It would have been a pleasant room under any other circumstances. Cream was the theme. There was a wide desk that ran along the far side, and on it sat a camera on a small tripod, still pointing at the chair. Beside the camera, a desktop computer hummed away to itself and its three monitors had all gone into standby mode. There was a microphone on a boom arm, swung off to one side.

A man’s room, kept by a man who cared how it looked. There was even a coaster.

And then there was the rest of it.

The blood had not stayed where a tidier death would have kept it. It had gone up the cream wall behind the chair in a fan, thinning to a fine spray near the ceiling. It had come down the back of the headrest and pooled in the seat and run off the front edge in two long ribbons that had dried partway to the carpet. It had decorated the monitors, all three of them, in diagonal lines of pressurized arterial spray that the textbooks always rendered as arcs and which in real life looked more like random brushstrokes. Down the front of the grey Capitals sweatshirt the body was wearing. Across the lap. Onto the carpet. There was blood on a framed photograph. There was a fine mist of it across the underside of the desk lamp where the bulb had cooked it dry overnight.

Ripley, who was confined to a square foot of space as not to contaminate the scene, said, ‘No need to ask who called it in. This went out live to tons of people.’

‘We had hundreds of calls. People all over the country dialed 911.’

‘Nice to know people still care,’ Ella said, then turned to the body. ‘It looks like our unsub’s hanging phase was just that.’

Ripley said, ‘Yeah. The good news is that we know exactly what happened and how it happened. No mystery there. How many times did you watch the video, Dark?’

‘A lot.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s the same man who killed Billy Hayes. He’s just updated his killing method.’

‘Updated?’ asked Hibbert. ‘I thought you both said hanging was the hardest way to kill someone.’

‘It’s joint number-one,’ Ella said.

‘Joint with what?’

‘Taking someone’s head clean off in one swoop,’ Ripley finished. ‘Decapitation isn’t easy. Decapitation in one swing, unless it’s with a guillotine, is unheard of.’

Ella didn’t turn back to Ripley. She was looking at the chair, and at what was in it, and at the angle of the wound at the collar.

‘From the video, we can glean the size of our guy. We heard it from Ronnie Cobb at the faire, but Cobb was drunk and scared, so I had it filed under maybe. The video’s not maybe. He fills the frame. Brennan’s chair is a normal chair and the man standing behind it makes it look like something out of a doll’s house. Six-eight wasn’t an exaggeration. If anything, Cobb undersold it.’

‘Agreed. The guy in that video is monstrous. What else?’

‘Second, our vic here was already gone before the blade ever came near him. You can see it. He’s in the chair, upright, but his head’s lolling, his eyes won’t hold still, he can’t lift his own hands. The killer lured him out of his office and drugged him, like he did with Hayes.’